


Tale as Old as Time

by nirejseki



Category: DC's Legends of Tomorrow (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Werewolf, Beauty and the Beast, Goes AU after Marooned, M/M, No Current Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-10
Updated: 2016-12-10
Packaged: 2018-09-07 17:02:05
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,514
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8808790
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nirejseki/pseuds/nirejseki
Summary: Big words aside, Len wasn’t actually planning on killing Mick, so he found somewhere quiet and unoccupied, where Rip said was safe, and left Mick there.
Turns out Rip’s idea of 'safe' just means from time manipulation.





	

**Author's Note:**

> For oneiriad's Coldwave Creature AU Extravaganza Bingo Board, Square: Werecreature

Len will never forgive himself for leaving Mick in that forest.

Big words aside, he wasn’t actually planning on killing Mick. He couldn’t. It was _Mick_. But Mick was acting crazier than usual and he needed out and Len – Len didn’t want out, not yet. So they were at an impasse. Selling out your own crew mid-job, though; that was an executable offense and Mick knew it.

Just as he knew that Len would never have the spine to do it.

So Len found somewhere quiet and unoccupied, where Rip said was safe, and left Mick there.

Turns out Rip’s idea of ‘safe’ just means _from time manipulation_.

Not from…other things.

Not from hunger and thirst.

Not from rage and self-harm.

Not from the wolves.

They killed Savage and blew up the Oculus and Len did what he promised he'd do and he _came back_ for his partner, just like he'd always planned.

Except his partner –

Isn’t his partner anymore.

The wolves howl in the night and they rip through bone as easily as meat, and they’re huge, hulking monsters like dire wolves, and Len was lifting his gun to shoot, to rescue the mostly dead person they’re ripping apart, except –

He knows one of them.

He _knows_ one of them. 

The wolves, they’re not just larger than regular wolves. They don’t have the eyes of wolves, either; they have the eyes of the men they are.

Were.

Len hides himself up a tree instead, waits for the sun to rise and the moon to fade. He does the breathing exercises he learned that time Mick dragged him with him to see his shrink. Tells himself that when the moon sets and they go back to normal that he’ll –

He doesn’t know what.

Apologize, maybe? Sorry I left you to be turned into a werewolf? 

But it’s not any better during the day. 

Oh, sure, they turn back to human. Physically, anyway. But they’re not _human_ , not inside: they’re wild, they’re savage, they snarl and beat each other and howl in victory. Mick is a rising star in their pack and he puts several younger challengers on the backs through sheer ferocity; he is well respected and the others nuzzle at his feet in honor of his victories. They don’t use words. 

At least Mick doesn’t have a lady-wolf, of which there seem to be several. They curl up with the fight-winners, but Mick snarls them off when they try it with him. There’s that much, at least. 

Len watches them.

They watch him.

They can smell him, of course, and sometimes the younger ones make a run at him, but Len’s too steady to be moved by such a thing. They growl at him, yip, and human throats should not make those noises.

_Mick_ shouldn’t make those noises.

Mick shouldn’t look at him and have his eyes be so blank, so empty, his mind vacant and gone and replaced by sheer savagery like he sometimes pretended. Mick shouldn’t look at Len and see nothing but _prey_.

_Obnoxious_ prey, at that.

The wolves can climb trees, during the day. They just don’t particularly want to. One wolf with a stupid greyish patch right on top of his head – Len calls him Bigwig – tries to run at the tree a few times, both while wolfish and while human (he’s young, but his hair is a blond so pale as to look grey, which explains the patch). 

Len watches them for _days_.

They turn wolfish every night there’s a moon, not just the full one; it’s only on the new moon that they don’t turn. They mostly sleep, that night, although several keep watch for hunters.

The full moon –

Well, the full moon happens.

What Len thought were large wolves turn out to just be regular grade moonshine. What happens on the full moons, that’s not a wolf.

That’s a _monster_.

Large and hulking, muscles bulging, teeth so long they scarcely fit into their skulls – bear-sized, minimum, for the _smallest_ of them – 

The stuff of nightmares.

Oh god, and Len _left_ Mick to this.

Len feels fury, at Rip for taking them on this trip, at Gideon for not warning him, but mostly at himself. He brought Mick here. He left Mick here.

There’s no apologizing for this.

Len follows the pack as they go, keeping well back and using his gun to ward them off if they come near. He sometimes goes back to the jump ship, which he took as his own after the horrors of the Oculus nearly killed him, but only to recharge his gun and eat a little. He needs to think of some way to deal with this whole situation, but his brain just keeps shutting down in horror. So he watches, and he follows, and he tries to think and think and think, and one day, some two months in, he decides.

It’s not a _good_ decision, but it’s a decision.

There’s no way he can bring Mick back home with him this way. Gideon reports no known cure, past or future, only scribblings of myth and legends, fairy tales. But they all say the same: there’s no way out. Even if he was to somehow get Mick’s mind back, which everyone says is impossible – and god, Len misses Mick _so much_ , his words, his sense of humor, everything that Mick never thought anyone appreciated about him – he’d still be a werewolf. 

There’s no place to hide from the moon. 

So.

If Mick can’t go to the mountain, then the mountain is going to damn well come to him. 

The mountain, in this case, meaning Len.

Len calls Lisa, back in 2016, and lets her know he’s probably not coming back this time. She protests, but he tells her it’s Mick, that he did something, that it’s the point of no return, and he tells her where all of his secret stashes are and his account numbers and everything, because he wants her to have them. 

She says she’ll keep them safe for him in case he pulls a miracle out of his ass.

He promises to look for one.

They both pretend he’s not lying.

And then Len packages up his cold gun – he liked being a supervillain, even more than being a superhero – and he takes off his coat and goggles and he goes out to the wolves in nothing but a set of boots and a light jacket for the wet and cold.

He knows his werewolf myths. He knows how new werewolves are made when they’re not born. He’s even seen it in action: one of the people they attacked and ripped apart didn't die in the night; instead, he rose up the next day, eyes lupine and teeth too long. The wounds of the attack heal to very faint white scars. Once Len had known what to look for, he’d looked, and he’d seen those pale white scars on Mick’s skin. If he hadn’t spent so much time memorizing Mick’s existing scars, he never would have seen them, but he had.

There are a lot of them.

Mick suffered before he died.

It hurt Len's heart to know that. He knows he needs them to do the same to him, if he's going to get back to where he belongs by Mick's side; he needs them to bite but not to kill. He licks his lips and swallows, and goes.

Len walks, weaponless, among them.

Except –

It _doesn’t work_.

They don’t bite him.

Hell, they barely pay attention to him.

He’s been watching them for months, now, well within sight and scent and sound, and he’s blasted cold at anyone who came too close, and now they don’t even see him as prey. He’s just – there. A mild annoyance.

One of the wolves – Bigwig again – snuffles and buts its head into Len’s midsection, making him fall back on his ass with a huff as all the air goes out of his lungs at once. 

Some of the puppies leap on him, but their little teeth barely tug at his clothing.

Len cannot get the wolves to bite him.

He curses the irony.

Even Mick won’t bite him, just sniffs at him warily and moves on. He’s one of the pack leaders, now, having defeated all comers on his way up. Only a few of the elders are more respected than he.

Still no lady-wolf, though. That’s something. 

Len wouldn't have enjoyed watching that.

He tries for the rest of the day and the next, but it doesn't work.

Well, Len is not so easily deterred.

Len goes to the nearest towns and starts asking questions. It takes another week and a half, but he finds his answer. There are more myths about becoming a wolf than just biting, even though that’s the one Hollywood taught him.

He waits for the full moon. 

Even with the wolves at their most vicious, their most hideously inhuman, they brush him off as nothing more than a pest. He follows them on their hunts through the forest, his slow human legs burning even as he paces himself not to go too fast but still not to lose them in the dark.

He gets lucky. It rains that night. 

He follows Mick, who he can always tell is Mick, even through the dark and the mud and the fur, because Mick’s eyes are always Mick’s eyes even when they’re not looking at Len with the mix of exasperation and fondness Mick always has.

The moon is already starting to set and the sun starting to think about rising when he catches up with Mick.

Wolf-Mick snarls at Len, clearly wondering why this not-wolf-not-prey has come up so close to him.

Len smiles at his partner and kneels down before him.

_Partners forever, till death do us part_ , he thinks, and also _this had better work_.

It’s a good thing Mick is so goddamn large in this form, because his footprint sinks deep into the mud, leaving plenty of space for the dewdrops to collect. 

Len drinks.

It’s terrible, of course; mostly mud and smelling like petrichor, and Len knows what that means, but Len’s had his face shoved in the dirt enough times not to care. 

And then he gets up and he goes to a tree and he waits.

Mick, strangely enough, waits with him, pacing angrily around him, never coming too close, but there even when all the other wolves have moved on.

About halfway through the day, Len feels a bit nauseous. 

By afternoon, he’s retching and asking Gideon for an anti-bacterial agent, only for her to say there’s nothing wrong with his system that she can recognize.

By evening, the spasms have gotten so bad that he can’t even think. 

By night – when the moon rises – 

Len wakes up.

He – wasn’t really expecting to, honestly. He feels like shit.

“You _fucking_ idiot,” a voice so familiar that it brings tears to his eyes says. 

“Mick,” Len croaks, and opens his eyes.

Mick’s kneeling there in front of him, naked and comfortable with it like he’s been these last few months, and he’s scowling at Len. The moonlight makes his burn scars stand out.

Moonlight?

“You didn’t turn,” Len says, wondering.

“No,” Mick says grumpily. “Apparently you invoked a get-out-of-jail free card.”

Len frowns.

That doesn’t sound right.

“Turns out, _apparently_ ,” and Mick sounds angry about this for some reason, “that while there isn’t any cure for being a werewolf, if a man’s true love follows him into the forest and drinks of the dew of his footprint –”

“It turns them into a werewolf, too,” Len says. That’s the story he heard.

“No, a _regular_ person drinking the dew in a wolf’s footprint turns into a werewolf,” Mick says. “A man's _true love_ , on the other hand, that is fucking _dumb enough_ to try to _turn themselves into a werewolf_ in order to _be together_ gets a bit of a different story.”

“Huh?” Len says unintelligently.

Mick jabs his finger at Len’s chest. “You fucking _Beauty and the Beast_ ed us.”

“I – what? Us?”

“We can all think again,” Mick says. “The whole pack. We’re still wolves, we’re still a pack, but now we’re more than just beasts. We’re –” He struggles for words. Mick hates words.

“We can think and we can talk, even in wolf form,” another man says. Len blinks at him. It’s Bigwig, and he’s grinning widely. “We’re, like, comic book werewolves now. All the pluses of being able to turn into giant death-monsters at will as long as there’s some moon out, none of the minuses of being totally feral. It’s _awesome_.”

“Comic books?” Len asks blankly. “What era is this, anyway?”

“Mid-900s,” Mick says. “Turns out it’s a good dump spot for troublemaking pirates that the Time Masters don’t want to kill for various reasons.”

He glares at Len.

“Or just want to torture,” Bigwig adds. “It’s considered worse than a death sentence.”

Mick huffs.

“I came back for you,” Len says woodenly, ignoring Bigwig to focus on Mick. He’s knows it’s not enough. Knows he shouldn’t have left at all. There’s no forgiveness for what he’s done; he wasn’t seeking it – all he wanted was to live out the rest of his life by Mick’s side, even if they were both essentially lobotomized. It would have been fair. Mick had been insulted - and Len had gotten that insult out of Rip's hide when he'd found out about it - and turned into a mindless beast; Len had always feared mindlessness most of all, but it would have been fair payback for what he did. He should have picked Mick over the team. He should have – “I know it’s not enough,” he says. “But I did come back. I was always going to come back.”

“Well,” Mick says, drawing out the syllables. “While normally I’d still be pretty pissed at you, you _did_ nearly suicide your way into curing an entire pack with _true love’s kiss_ , so I’m gonna forgive you just this once.”

Len stares at him.

Forgiveness?

Mick couldn't possibly mean - 

Mick yanks him up and presses their lips together.

Len wasn’t expecting that. Wasn’t expecting to feel that ever again. 

Mick hums against his lips.

Oh, right.

More important things to worry about now. 

“Wait,” Len says against Mick’s lips, even though he’s kissing back, hard as he can. “How was before true love’s kiss? I didn’t even touch you!”

“I’m hoping there’s some extra benefit to the kissing part,” Mick lies, and kisses Len again.

The wolves howl in approval behind them.

"You'd better have brought a time ship," Mick says against Len's mouth. "If we have to get the Time Master's attention, it's not going to be pretty for anyone."

"Don't worry, I brought one," Len says. "And everyone can come."

He kisses Mick for another moment, then breaks away to look around at the pack.

Mick's pack. His pack too, now, he guesses. 

"Though," Len says, "we might have to take multiple trips."

Mick grins.


End file.
